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Lobsters0 Hot0 comments31 min read
Stabilizing Rust's never type
Rust's never type (denoted "!"), long used internally by the compiler but unstable, has been stabilized after more than two years of work by contributor "waffle," merged in a pull request on August 24. The never type marks functions that never return and enables both more efficient generic code (via infallible error types) and simpler type inference for constructs like infinite loops. Stabilization required changing the compiler's fallback type from the unit type () to ! itself starting with the 2024 edition, and making the standard library's Infallible type an alias for !. Both changes were individually breaking but designed to cancel out; testing via the crater tool found 3,300 crates negatively impacted, though only seven were fully broken outright, with most others fixed via backported patches. Starting in Rust 1.99, the never type is stable and Infallible becomes an alias for it, with maintainers offering workarounds like pinning to Rust 1.98 or specifying explicit return types for affected code.
Source: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1091015/d9e48318ed242b41. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
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